Dangerous

By: Alycia Linwood

Element Preservers Series, Book 1

Chapter 01

Magic has always existed in every part of our planet. It is not known when and how people came into possession of it. There are many legends and stories about it, but it's hard to tell which of them could possibly contain the truth.

The best-known is the story of the God of Magic, who came to our planet many years ago and gave every human being control over one of the four main elements: fire, water, air or earth. The magic ability was supposed to help people and make their lives easier, or at least the God of Magic wanted it to be so.

People were very grateful for the God’s generous gift and agreed to follow the only rule he had given them. And that was the rule that the elements shouldn’t mix. Ever.

Ah, how I wish it had stayed like that, but no. People had to be people and ignore the rule.

A few hundred years ago, people were still worshipping the God of Magic and they were carefully choosing the person to make a family with. But the world started to change; people discovered science and some stopped believing in the God of Magic, claiming that all the stories they were told had been invented. According to them, magic is just in our nature, part of our genetic code.

But science wasn’t the only reason why people stopped following the rule. The difference between the rich and poor was growing, and people had trouble finding the right partner, because the social status became as important as the element when it came to choosing a person to spend the rest of your life with. The result of it was that only a few people could have gotten married, and that made the rest of the population really unhappy.

No matter what their reasons were, people started having families with those who had different elements. But they didn’t expect there would be horrible consequences. The children whose parents had a different element inherited only one of the elements, but much weaker than the original one.

By further mixing of already mixed elements, children who didn’t have any kind of element were born. That wasn’t exactly the worst thing in the world; the disease that was created in the process was. Apparently, some kind of genetic mistake occurred in a few cases, which made people who didn’t have any element want to have one really badly, and turned them into cold-blooded murderers.

Those people, today known as the magic disease carriers, had the urge to kill someone with an element to come into possession of it. Of course, once they started killing and felt the joy of the element in them, they couldn’t stop. And because the element simply couldn’t stay in their system for long, they had to kill again.

When the first cases of magic disease appeared, they caused panic all over the world. But it was nothing compared with what happened when it was discovered that the magic disease was contagious. People were so afraid of getting the disease that they decided that anyone who showed the symptoms should be killed.

At that time, many people were killed simply because someone had accused them of having the disease. There almost wasn’t any way to prove you didn’t have the disease, except showing your magic ability, which was a problem to those with a weak or nonexistent element. Luckily, those days are behind us, and there are special laws and police today to take care of the ‘magic disease carriers’ problem.

But 13 years ago even special police couldn’t do much to avoid a big incident when it was discovered that one of the richest and most influential families actually had the disease. Mr. Liandre, like every great businessman, managed to hide all the killings he and his wife had done during years. Maybe it would have never been discovered if he hadn’t made a mistake and killed a member of another famous family.

Even though the special police was sent to take care of that matter, people were too outraged to let it go, and went to burn down Mr. Liandre’s house. I don’t remember much of it though, but it must have been horrible. Today no one really wants to remember or mention it, and it’s better like that.

There are still many questions left about magic disease and scientists are trying to find the cure or simply find out more about the disease. Just a few years ago, it has been discovered that the disease could actually be transmitted only by sexual contact. It couldn’t even be transmitted by blood, which puzzled the scientists a lot. Well, I guess the magic disease simply doesn’t have any logic.